2LO

2LO
London;
Frequency	857 kHz
Ownership
Owner	British Broadcasting Company Ltd. (from 14 November 1922 to 31 December 1926); British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (from 1 January 1927 to 2LO split-off into the BBC Regional and National programmes on 9 March 1930)
History
First air date	11 May 1922; 102 years ago
Last air date	9 March 1930; 94 years ago
Technical information
Licensing authority	General Post Office
ERP	100 watts
Transmitter coordinates	51°30′43″N 0°07′06″W / 51.511994°N 0.118383°W

2LO Calling

Unidentified male announcer, speaking the 2LO call sign

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2LO was the second radio station to regularly broadcast in the United Kingdom (the first was 2MT). It began broadcasting on 11 May 1922, for one hour a day from the seventh floor of Marconi House in London's Strand, opposite Somerset House.

History

Initially the power was 100 watts on 360 metres (832 kHz). 2LO was allowed to transmit for seven minutes, after which the "operator" had to listen on the wavelength for three minutes for possible instructions to close down. On 14 November 1922 the station was transferred to the new British Broadcasting Company which in 1923 took up the nearby Savoy Hill for its broadcasting studios. At midnight on New Year's Eve 1923, the twelve chimes of Big Ben were broadcast for the first time to mark the new year.^[1]

In 1927 the company became the British Broadcasting Corporation. On 9 March 1930 2LO was replaced by the BBC Regional Programme and the BBC National Programme. The letters LO continued to be used internally as a designation in the BBC for technical operations in the London area (for example, the numbering of all recordings made in London contained LO). The code LO was changed to LN in the early 1970s.

Preservation and legacy

Parts of the 2LO transmitter in the Science Museum, London (2013)

The 2LO transmitter now belongs to the Science Museum, having been donated by Crown Castle International on 7 November 2002.^[2]^[3] It is displayed in the Information Age gallery on the second floor of the museum.

Marconi House was demolished in 2006, apart from the listed façade, which was incorporated into a new hotel complex.^[4] A first-hand account of a broadcast from 2LO is given in The Spell of London by H. V. Morton.

The 'LO' part of 2LO's callsign was adopted in 1924 by the metropolitan radio station in Melbourne which, since 1932, has been a part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The station, 3LO, still has this callsign allocated to it, but since 2000 it has used different on-air names: as from 2017, it was 774 ABC Melbourne; and it is now ABC Radio Melbourne.^[5]

The amateur radio callsign G2LO is currently held by the staff association at Arqiva, formerly Crown Castle International, formerly the domestic part of BBC Transmitter Department.^[6]

In fiction

2LO is briefly mentioned in the 1928, Lord Peter Wimsey, detective short-story The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question by Dorothy L. Sayers.^[7]

2LO is also mentioned in Chapter 32 of Anthony Burgess’s “Earthly Powers” 1980 as part of a fictional episode involving the narrator’s brother Tom Toomey.

A 2LO broadcast with a weather forecast and news bulletin is mentioned in Chapter V of sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Maracot Deep 1927-28.

References

^ Macdonald, Peter (2004). Big Ben : the bell, the clock and the tower. Stroud: Sutton. ISBN 0-7509-3827-7. OCLC 56657409. Retrieved 1 December 2023 – via www.worldcat.org. A few days earlier a microphone had been set up on the roof of a nearby building, No. 1 Bridge Street, just opposite the Houses of Parliament. As the time approached midnight the chimes of the Great Clock ringing out the old year were followed on the hour by the twelve deep strokes of Big Ben ringing in the new, and broadcast, by means of a temporary line running to the control room at Savoy Hill, to listeners tuned to 2LO, the BBC's first radio transmitter, then barely a year old.
^ "Gift to nation marks BBC's 80th anniversary". BBC Press Office. 3 November 2002. Retrieved 1 December 2023.
^ "Science Museum Gets Original BBC Transmitter". Culture24. 8 November 2002. Archived from the original on 9 July 2021.
^ "Marconi House, Strand / Aldwych, London". The Music Hall and Theatre Site. Retrieved 1 December 2023.
^ Radio Melbourne was formerly the slogan for commercial station 3AW. Both 3LO and 3AW are considered rivals for the same audience.
^ "Callsign Database". www.qrz.com. Retrieved 1 December 2023.
^ Sayers, Dorothy L. (2016). "The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question". Lord Peter views the body. London: Hodder. ISBN 978-1-4736-2132-9. OCLC 947925610. Retrieved 1 December 2023 – via www.worldcat.org. It was by a continual and personal badgering of the Chief Engineer at 2LO on the question of "Why is Oscillation and How is it Done?" that his lordship incidentally unmasked the great Ploffsky gang of Anarchist conspirators,